Gerry McGovern writes about "Why content management software hasn't worked":
"Content management software hasn't worked because it was badly designed and massively over-hyped. Software companies lied about their products, charging criminal prices for crap software. It hasn't worked because organizations didn't understand content. They wanted a quick fix. They issued specifications that bore little relation to what they actually needed."
No big surprises: many CMS vendors sell feature-rich bloatware - many CMS customers buy by quantity (how many features) rather than quality (does it do what we want). But if it's not surprising, why do we still fall for the feature-trap?
I managed a CMS procurement a year ago for a mid-sized company (500 staff) wanting to build an internal publishing system as part of their knowledge management initiative. We looked at various vendors in the CMS/KMS/portal space and asked for expressions of interest from a number of leading players as well as some niche companies. For the same value to us (ie ignoring all of the glitz and glamour that we didn't want), the highest costs were roughly ten times the lowest.
We asked for initial deployment costs and three year costs. It was interesting that the range in costs, low to high, was the same in both cases, even though the cost structures were different. Some solutions were heavy up-front but then had little marginal cost over the three-year lifespan. Others were costed evenly or ramped up over time. But the spread between low and high was still a factor of ten - to meet the same set of straightforward requirements.
This bears out McGovern's issues. Too many CMS vendors sell cool features and aggressively push their complete software suite irrespective of the customers' actual requirements. But at the same time, too many customers buy by the pound - more features equals better solutions - without considering how they're going to use the CMS systems once they've bought them. This simply perpetuates the vendors' approach.
I certainly agree that appointing an editor to manage the procurement is better than leaving it in the hands of pure technologists. I remember a woeful tale a few years back in the dot-com glory days from a managing editor at one of the major UK magazine publishers. His company were going online in a big way. IT procured a multi-million pound CMS for the whole organisation. After waiting months for the installation and shake-down, it was released to the business. But no-one had asked the editors how they worked or what they wanted - there was a complete mis-match with their offline publishing tools and processes. Nothing fitted into the workflow they had spent years refining. The CMS had been sold and bought on features not requirements.
The lesson is an obvious one: get the users involved. Yes, a CMS is often a big hunk of technology - and yes, there are hard questions that IT need to ask of the vendors. But the procurement must be owned by the writers, editors and publishers. Editors are pragmatic folk trained to cut through waffle and get to the real story - what could be better experience for dissecting sales hype and getting to the heart of a product?
(Thanks to Mathemagenic.)
8:37:14 PM 
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